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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

"Bright Star" the Film, "This Living Hand," and three poems by Anna Journey referencing Keats and Sappho

On the right, you'll find the movie poster for Bright Star, the forthcoming film about John Keats and Fanny Brawne's love affair at the end of his life. The film stars Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish. You can watch the trailer below.

I don't know. I'm skeptical. I think I'd be much more likely to see a biopic about John Keats and his last few years that focuses on his writing rather than the Hollywood-idealized love affair. After watching the trailer, the screenplay and John/Fanny plot seem as if they could be set in any time period, any environment. The "characters" seem stock to me. That the film is based on Keats and Brawne seems almost arbitrary, and this makes me sad.

I think I'd much rather see a film called "This Living Hand"--one about John Keats struggling to understand his oncoming death and reconciling his poetry with that fact, that he'd never finish his work, that his potential would never be fulfilled. Doesn't that sound better?

Give me the tragic and the elegiac. In real life, love arises out of those two anyway, no?

[This living hand, now warm and capable]

This living hand, now warm and capableOf earnest grasping, would, if it were coldAnd in the icy silence of the tomb,So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nightsThat thou would wish thine own heart dry of bloodSo in my veins red life might stream again,And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—I hold it towards you.

John Keatsfrom The Complete Poems

I'm pretty sure we'll see this in the theater just because the opportunity to see and support a biopic about a poet is so rare. I'm just crossing my fingers that it doesn't fail at the box office. If it does, chances are no studio exec is going to want to finance another film about a poet for a while.

Question: What poets should have biopics made about their lives and what would you title said film?

_______

I'd seen several of her poems in journals and heard about Anna Journey's new book a few months ago, but with studying for comps and the semester rolling, I wasn't able to make time for it. Then, a few days ago, Sandy Longhorn posted a few lines from one of Journey's poems on her blog. That was all the reminder I needed. I'm happy to say that the library had a copy of her book, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, and I was able to make some time last night and this morning to read it.

I find these poems very intriguing for their diction, their musicality, the blending of higher and lower registers. As I told a couple people yesterday, "It's an odd book with odd poems." And I mean that in the best way, in the sense that I want to re-enter these poems. Not to, in a way, "figure them out." But to exist in this slightly askew world.

The poems are not overly erudite or stand-offish, though they do require you to jog at a faster pace than what you may be used to with other poets. And she has a great ability to turn a corner. "Change of pace and change of directions," as my old soccer coaches used to say. That's the best way I can describe the imagination behind these poems.

The boy heard the calcium crackof his father’s skull on cobblestone.Though he was at school in Enfield,in a dream he knew wood doveslanding in the brittle armsof a barkless aspen shocked an icicleloose to stab into the soft rumpof a startled horse. The nudge of itslong face flashing in his father’slast landscape was his mother’spalomino throat—her secrecyof birthmarks under crinoline.This was the wrong seasonfor perfection, lovers, cowslipsin a field. He allowed the birdstheir darting eyes, desultorysong—watched the white steamrise from the horse’s back.

Walking Upright in a Field of Devils

Because billy goats rise to the height of a womanand walk upright, I saw a field of devils,

blue and vertical, horned in the moonlight, heatlightning in their luminous beards. Because the static

of grackles crying from ball moss in mesquitemeant this could be Italy, though it was the black

fields caught between strip mallsflanking Houston.

It's true that Keats walked further and furtherfrom England into Scotland and the landscape grew

more grim with every step. Lakes shrunk to a slurpin each cheek. It's also true

that ships from a distance bob as copper weathercocksover the thatch of cottages. True, the prickly pear

is a leper dropping its limbs in the field. What is untrue?The shape of a lung filled like a trough

might press down on a man's stomach—he'd write his lover: a bellyache

brief as a devil's beard.In the field: goat-eyed and planetary,

something about to move, the half-bloomed moon,a pecked-out tea rose. The sun still hours away

in another century—morning stalling its laudanumeyes over a field, a deathbed. Bodiless.

Then the rise.

Sappho on the Edge of the Bayou

Coughed up the jazz band’s brass throats,weddings are a hollow musicpressed thickly around curlsof the wrought-iron gate,the cast solid magnolia. There is rustcoppering down the fineedges of everything herein this violet light—the white pickup’seaten paint, rose ash of cinder blocks,the one cool stingof dill on my palm. I wavegood-bye to you as the stoneface of the swamp refusesyour far-off reflection. It’s betterthis way. As you leave underthat snow of thrown rice, your veilis the thinnest fishing net. Gongyla, armand arm with a man whose vowgrows heavier midair—it hangsthere like a darkeningsmile, sweat on the edgesof your gown. This is the song I writefor your wedding, love, as pyramidsrise and weather: when willowsstrangle the water pipes, a kissof cornmeal on your brow.Now I wipe a stone bird’s wings; nowthe washboards miss a beat. With thissong I am snappedloose like the sheep-gutstrings of a lyre.

3 comments:

Well I don't know about "eloquently," but I would like to thank YOU for your post a few days ago. Like I was telling someone yesterday, this seems to be one of those books that can help one discover their own language in new ways, the stuff that's rattling around and hasn't gone anywhere. I guess that's what you were getting at in your post, too, wasn't it?--lines that "strike a chord" was your phrase, I believe. Yesindeedee--these poems do that.

About Me

Joshua Robbins teaches creative writing and literature at the University of the Incarnate Word. He is the author of Praise Nothing (University of Arkansas Press, 2013).
His recognitions include the James Wright Poetry Award, the New South Prize, selection for the Best New Poets anthology, multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in poetry from the Sewanee Writers' Conference.

His work regularly appears in journals such as Mid-American Review, Third Coast, Verse Daily, Copper Nickel, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere.